Robert McLean, Madeline Long, Joel Ewing/Photo:

Questioning whether it’s still possible to find love in Paris, the protagonist of Mat Smart’s play finds he must redefine the thing itself. Vincent has traveled on a whim to his dead grandparents’ Paris apartment, armed with nothing but a new suit and a suitcase full of his grandfather’s love letters to his grandmother. It’s here that he somehow feels best positioned to discover whether he is truly in love with the girlfriend he left in Chicago.

Director Steve Wilson’s take on the play is unabashedly romantic, although those forced flights of romantic fancy bog down a play that already lacks much external conflict. The cast, led by Joel Ewing, is a charming bunch of anti-cynics. Krista Krauss and Max Lesser provide some relief in a claustrophobic environment, and Robert McLean, as the ghost of Vincent’s grandfather, infuses the show with just the kind of old French charisma Vincent is desperate to torpedo. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

LiveWire Chicago Theatre at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln, (773)404-7336. Through April 17.

Aaron Kirby, Tracy Garrison

RECOMMENDED

Joe Orton’s 1964 ode to innuendo is tame by today’s standards, written when men were not gay but “sensitive.” The piece works best as a time capsule of repression and misogyny, a reminder of how far we’ve come.

Rootless charmer Sloane (Aaron Kirby) arrives at Kath’s (Tracy Garrison) looking to rent a room. Her father (Gary Murphy) knows him but can’t place the face. Brother Ed (David Schaplowsky) initially wants him out, yet quickly hires him. The power dynamic shifts back and forth between the three.

Kirby nails the baby-faced seduction but needs work on the menace. Garrison captures her character’s simple-minded neediness; the competent Kirby is a bit too young to dodder. Schaplowsky has the unenviable task of portraying his character’s sexual duplicity; one can’t help but wonder that, if he wasn’t required to do that by his era’s social norms, this might have been a very different story. (Lisa Buscani)

Project 891 at The City Lit Theater, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, (773)853-3210. Through March 27.

RECOMMENDED

Teddy, a philosophy professor, returns to his childhood home to introduce his wife to his domineering father, timid uncle and two intimidating brothers. Rife with sexual tension and barely repressed violence, “The Homecoming” is by any standards a discomfiting piece of work, with its ambiguous dialogue and slowly creeping sense of unease. Recognizing the importance of pauses and gestures, director Geoff Button’s superb cast manages to capture not only the menace underlying the character’s interactions, but also the sometimes awkward dark comedy of Harold Pinter’s script. The result is a riveting two-hour production that feels much shorter, as the six actors relish each bit of malice they toss at each other within the walls of their threadbare living room. Combined with the set, the eerie lighting design makes the scene breaks as ominous as the story. More than forty years after winning the Tony Award for Best Play, “The Homecoming” still resonates. (Zach Freeman)

Mary-Arrchie Theatre at Angel Island, 735 West Sheridan, (773)871-0442. Through April 10.

Here’s the press release from Lookingglass Theatre Company:

Lookingglass Theatre Company announces 2011-2012 season featuring three productions about history-making moments in America, including work by Lookingglass Ensemble Members John Musial, J. Nicole Brooks and Andy White

Chicago, IL—Lookingglass Theatre Company proudly announces its 2011-2012 season, featuring three productions about three moments in American history—The Great Fire that razed Chicago, Jackie Robinson’s game-changing signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the 1915 Chicago tragedy of the sinking of The Eastland.   This upcoming season, Lookingglass will tell the stories of those who, whether famous or forgotten, were caught in the crucible of the moment.   Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Dave Rentauskas

By Benjamin Rossi

The premiere of The New Colony’s “So Many Days,” the young theater company’s first short film, feels unmistakably like a gathering of friends. A live band made up of company members croons bluegrass tunes about Oriental lovers and drinking till you die; everyone seems to know the words. Someone in the company had sent out an email encouraging people to wear flannel shirts in homage to the short’s early sixties Deep South setting, but it’s difficult to distinguish those who complied from the rest of the hipster crowd.

A makeshift bar set off in a corner of host Collaboraction’s small space serves whiskey and PBR in Solo cups as company members greet people in the Flat Iron Arts Building’s third floor landing, asking, “So who’s your friend in the company?”

With “So Many Days,” the barely three-year-old New Colony is taking a novel, if not entirely unprecedented, step towards filmmaking. It’s just one more in a series of remarkable moves for the theater group. And while it is a modest beginning, New Colony members say its latest effort is a harbinger for things to come. But as its projects become more ambitious, the company may come up against obstacles that bedeviled other attempts by Chicago theaters to jump from stage to screen. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Court Theatre:

COURT THEATRE ANNOUNCES 2011-12 SEASON

COURT THEATRE’S 57TH SEASON TO FEATURE
TONY KUSHNER’S ANGELS IN AMERICA DIRECTED BY CHARLES NEWELL,
A WORLD PREMIERE ADAPTATION OF RALPH ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER MCELROEN AND ADAPTATIONS OF WORKS BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND HOMER

Read the rest of this entry »

Diego Tortelli & Monica Cervantes/Photo: Cheryl Mann

Fernando Hernando Magadan, from Spain, is a soft-spoken man of 30 or so. So soft-spoken in fact that the squeak of socks on the Marley flooring rang louder than his voice as he gave direction to the Luna Negra dancers working on “Naked Ape.” Magadan originally choreographed the piece for Nederlands Dans Theatre, staged in the round and performed in the airy City Hall of The Hague. Magadan said the open space inspired him to create the white, glowing sculptures, made from stiffened, free-standing shirts and pants lit from within, that will be scattered about the perimeter of the stage. Inside the clothes—which drape, rumple and crease as though on invisible mannequins—are light sensors that trigger sounds, allowing the dancers to manipulate the aural environment. With a good portion of the music provided by Bach and the visual impact of simply dressed dancers moving between luminescent, interactive, white clothing-sculptures, the scene feels classical, viewed through a postmodern lens. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Governor Walker, eat your heart out. It’s hard to imagine a more timely and heartfelt Illinois response to the labor crisis in Wisconsin than a revival of the 1977 musical version of Louis “Studs” Terkel’s 1974 bestselling book “Working.” Using his ever-present tape recorder, Terkel interviewed a wide variety of workers about their attitudes concerning work and uncovered a wealth of information about the extraordinary thoughts of “ordinary” workers.

Several of the stories were turned into soliloquies with songs penned by Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, James Taylor, Mary Rodgers, Susan Birkenhead and Stephen Schwartz that were given a 1970s pop-rock sensibility and were often discussing jobs that were cutting-edge for the time, but the references had become rusty and irrelevant. With new songs added by Lin-Manuel Miranda to update things a bit but more significantly, the show figured out two important ways to bridge the three-and-a-half decade time gap.

First, much as the 1982 televised “American Playhouse” production had done, have Terkel himself and his tape recorder (in this case four of them) frame the proceedings. Since Terkel passed away in 2008—and you could imagine him kicking himself that he missed this onstage opportunity—his voice and photos are used to recall his powerful persona, which does help ground this material in time and space. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It’s a mixed repertory for SPDW at the Dance Center this weekend, including a world premiere by guest choreographer Carl Flink, artistic director of Black Label Movement, a Minneapolis-based company named not after Mr. Walker’s 12-year-old Scotch but, even more badass, generic brand food labels, a la Repo Man. Flink’s work looks hard at damage, from shipwrecks to wrecked hearts, oil spills to televised wars and his subject matter for SPDW is physical collision. “HIT” asks the audience to embrace collision as event; anyone who has been in a bicycle or vehicle accident knows there’s nothing like high impact to stop time and notice the minutia of the moment. Also on the program is Joanna Rosenthal’s noir-inspired intrigue “Grey Noise,” a finalist from last fall’s audience-judged dance competition The A.W.A.R.D. Show! and “To Have and To Hold” by Joanie Smith and Danial Shapiro. (Sharon Hoyer)

Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 South Michigan, (312)369-8330. Thu-Sat, March 10-12 at 8pm. $26-$30.

Photo: Sean Williams

RECOMMENDED

In Laura Eason’s adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, things may be austere, but nothing is simple, as stoic Ethan Frome (Philip R. Smith) pines for the buoyant Mattie Silver (Louise Lamson), caregiver to his malingering wife Zeena (Lisa Tejero). The minimal set design, a Lookingglass standard, is especially apt here, capturing the bleakness of the town of Starkfield (what a name), the Frome homestead, and the lives of the characters. Even the dialogue is sparse, though there’s a catch to that: the constantly lurking narrator (Andrew White) frequently steps in to further explain actions, events and motives. If there’s one way to make it clear that a play has been adapted from a novel, this is it. It’s a distracting choice and effectively sets the entire story up as a play within a play. Still, the tragedy of lives unfulfilled is delicately rendered and haunting, even after the lights come up. (Zach Freeman)

The Lookingglass Theatre Company, 821 North Michigan, (312)337-0665. Through April 17.